by Rik Farrow

Rik Farrow provides UNIX and Internet security consulting and training. He is the author of UNIX System Security and System Administrator's Guide to System V.

<rik@spirit.com>


I am a communist. I admit it. Everyone in my company makes the same amount that I do, regardless of what their position is. The current cultural imperialism — that those who are smarter, or simply more sly, heartless, and aggressive, should make as much as 120 times the pay of lowly workers — strikes me as obscene.

Of course, there is only one person in my company. I just finished last year's books on Saturday, then started vacuuming and emptying the waste cans. So I can afford to pay "everybody" the same thing.

I have visited Eastern Europe and have seen some of the effects of paying everyone the same, regardless of skill level or the effort put into their jobs. I saw a man in Hungary spend an entire day working on a single potted plant in a hotel, empty stores, and frightened people. The leveling effect of Communism did not work very well, eliminating incentive and awarding slackers.

I must admit I enjoyed riding the "free" transit system in Budapest. You were supposed to pay, but nobody did because in the days of Communism, nobody had to. Aspen also has a free public-transit system, although theirs is official.

The idea that free software, or more formally open-source software, is communist, is silly. Under the Communist system, everyone was paid equally, and not very well — unless you were a party official, in which case you received perks. Writers of open-source software do not get paid at all, and there are no party bosses living lives of relative luxury. Most likely these programmers have day jobs, and their bosses live lives of real luxury based on their ability to manage, trick, or coerce people smarter than themselves to work under them.

Illusions

I like working for myself because I am my own boss. Not that I am a very nice boss. I often make myself work strange hours and never pay for overtime. I wonder if I would even get vacations if my wife didn't make me take them.

But I cannot say that I have enjoyed working for other bosses. I have watched several companies go down the tubes, led by bosses driving Porsches (the status car in those days) who hadn't got a clue. Bosses who hired VPs of marketing who told anyone who would listen that the product didn't matter, they could be selling toilet paper. Only marketing matters.

Or bosses who hired very smart engineers, then refused to listen to them. You know the type: You tell them what you think should be done, and six months later, it's their idea, and it gets done. Or you get together with a few co-workers and brainstorm what the most important issues are, only to have the meeting broken up by the bosses. Two years later, those same bosses have realized these issues are crippling the product and demand that they be fixed immediately.

No, I am not Scott Adams. These are real-life experiences from two computer companies where I worked briefly as an employee during the last 20 years. That the current system works well is an illusion, because it could work much better than it does. And open-source software is a model for that process, where groups of programmers work together and new ideas are not put on hold waiting for the boss to get the idea. And there are several teams working on similar projects (GNOME, KDE, etc), and eventually the best will (likely) triumph. The boss in this case is one of the workers.

And note that open-source software can pay very well. Richard Stallman wears ragged clothing to make a political statement. Linus Torvalds, Eric Allman, Paul Vixie (to name a few) are doing very well, as are many other open-source proponents.

More Illusions

And while I am on the topic of money, I'd like you to think about economics for a moment. Not that I am very good at this either, but if the process of concentration of wealth into the hands of a few that began during the Reagan administration continues, we will have a big problem. Trickle-down wealth doesn't work. (Servants don't get paid very well.) The enormous wealth of a few is based on being able to sell product to people, and if the masses have no money, the wealthy will no longer make any money. So the end result of our current economic system might be a subclass that owns everything, or perhaps a collapse.

We could go back to a feudal system, where powerful lords own all the property and "permit" the vassals to work for them. Actually, in some ways we already have, with corporations owning most farms, factories, stores, and businesses. If you are permitted to work for them, you might be able to "buy" a house, so you can spend your income paying interest to another large corporation (the bank).

And what about freedom? Are you free today? What would happen if you decided to study art for the next year or cruise on a sailboat to Panama? Move to a deserted island in the South Pacific or live in Iceland for a year? How about taking off this very afternoon and sitting in a cafe? Could you do any of these things today, or would you risk losing "everything"?

I am not in favor of "overthrowing the system." I watched lots of friends attempt that in the '70s and early '80s, and they obviously did not succeed. But I applaud the notion of exploring new kinds of creativity and alternatives to the way we work. Open source is both of these things, a noble experiment that has already borne fruit. Communism is dead, as dead as those religions that forbid their members sex.

But other economic systems will emerge. It remains to be seen if those systems will be better for most of us or only for a few. My personal belief is that cooperative systems will be the most successful, and that they will also benefit most people, rather than just a lucky (or aggressive) few. And open source represents a model of a cooperative system.

An Accident

In my April Fool column, I stated incorrectly that Linux was ported to more other processor architectures than any other version of a UNIX-like system. Several people wrote email to let me know that I was wrong, and that NetBSD has been ported to many more architectures than Linux.

I am happy to have been corrected and welcome learning by my mistakes. I will not be a boss and ignore my own ignorance, but relish the opportunity to learn. And I hope that some member of the *BSD community will write an article for ;login: that explains as fairly as possible how the four versions of BSD that exist today are different (as well as how they are alike).

Some people pointed out to me that StarOffice already runs under UNIX and permits the reading of MS Word files. It is also likely that if you used that product in cooperation with your email reader, you could be vulnerable to some of the same macro viruses so savored by MS users today. Oh well.

The Melissa virus is not the Microsoft Worm I have been predicting. Although it shares some similarities with the original Internet Worm (written by a guy from New Jersey, and attacking homogeneous systems automatically via networks using known security holes), it is not the Big One. We need a slightly larger mass of NT systems for that to occur. It will be amusing, but only from a safe distance.

For now, communist that I am, sitting in a nice hotel room waiting for my stomach to settle before I get in the hot tub, I have just one more thing to say:
WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!